Haarland stood up. “All right,” he said. “Sorry I snapped at you. Come on; I’ll go up to the ship with you.”
And that was the way it happened. Ross found himself in the longliner, then with Haarland in the tiny, ancient, faster-than-light ship which had once been tender to the ship that colonized Halsey’s Planet. He found himself shaking hands with a red-eyed, suddenly-old Haarland, watching him crawl through the coupling to the longliner, watching the longliner blast away.
He found himself setting up the F-T-L course and throwing in the drive.
..... 5
ROSS was lucky. The second listed inhabited planet was still inhabited.
He had not quite stopped shuddering from the first when the approach radar caught him. The first planet was given in the master charts as “Ragansworld. Pop. 900,000,000; diam. 9400 m.; mean orbit 0.8 AU,” and its co-ordinates went on to describe it as the fourth planet of a small G-type sun. There had been some changes made: the co-ordinates now intersected well inside a bright and turbulent gas cloud.
It appeared that suppressing the F-T-L drive had not quite annihilated war.
But the second planet, Gemser—there, he was sure, was a world where nothing was seriously awry.
He left the ship mumbling a name to himself: “Franklin Foundation.” And he was greeted by a corporal’s guard of dignified and ceremonially dressed men; they smiled at him, welcomed him, shook his hand, and invited him to what seemed to be the local equivalent of the administration building. He noticed disapprovingly that they didn’t seem to go in for the elaborate decontamination procedures of Halsey’s Planet, but perhaps, he thought, they had bred disease-resistance into their bloodlines. Certainly the four men in his guide party seemed hale and well-preserved, though the youngest of them was not less than sixty.
“I would like,” he said, “to be put in touch with the Franklin Foundation, please.”